Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World

In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators.

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

From an early age, it is drilled into our heads: Restlessness, distraction, and ignorance are the enemies of success. We’re told that learning is all self-discipline, that we must confine ourselves to designated study areas, turn off the music, and maintain a strict ritual if we want to ace that test, memorize that presentation, or nail that piano recital. But what if almost everything we were told about learning is wrong?

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the New Innovation Era

From two leading experts in education and entrepreneurship, an urgent call for the radical reimagining of American education so that we better equip students for the realities of the 21st-century economy.

Michael Shapiro says:"the most important book you may read in your life!"

Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools

From grade school to graduate school, from the poorest public institutions to the most affluent private ones, our educational system is failing students. In his provocative new book, cognitive scientist and best-selling author Roger Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

The new era of gamification and human-focused design optimizes for motivation and engagement over traditional function-focused design. Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferate. However, few people understand how to merge the two fields into experience designs that reliably increases business metrics and generates a return on investment.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

The Element shows the vital need to enhance creativity and innovation by thinking differently about human resources and imagination. It is an essential strategy for transforming education, business, and communities to meet the challenges of living and succeeding in the 21st century.

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that theyve carefully built up and stored away. Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into the stream.

How the Mind Works

In this delightful, acclaimed bestseller, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness?

Disrupting Class, Expanded Edition: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

Studies in neuroscience reveal that the way we learn doesn't always match up with the way we are taught. To stay competitive - academically, economically, and technologically - we need to apply the proven principles of disruptive innovation to our educational system. Disrupting Class will show you how.

Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative

There is a paradox. As children, most of us think we are highly creative; as adults many of us think we are not. What changes as children grow up? Organizations across the globe are competing in a world that is changing faster than ever. They say they need people who can think creatively, who are flexible and quick to adapt.

Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

Whether you're a CEO, a parent, or merely a person who wants to make a difference, you probably wish you had more influence with the people in your life. But most of us stop trying to make change happen because we believe it is too difficult, if not impossible. We learn to cope rather than learning to influence. Influencer is a thought-provoking audiobook that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

In this book Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create lives that are both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of whom or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters

Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club". It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of minds do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who have discovered that minds - while incredibly important - are a matter of perception.

The Industries of the Future

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities.

The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.

Five Minds for the Future

We live in a time of vast changes that include accelerating globalization, mounting quantities of information, the growing hegemony of science and technology, and the clash of civilizations. Those changes call for new ways of learning and thinking in school, business, and the professions. Listen as psychologist Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

Publisher's Summary

The 21st century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic.

Typically, when we think of culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. In A New Culture, Thomas and Brown explore a second sense of culture, one that responds to its surroundings organically. It not only adapts, it integrates change into its process as one of its environmental variables. By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, the authors create a vision of learning for the future that is achievable, scalable and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it. The result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving, the personal is both enhanced and refined in relation to the collective, and the ability to manage, negotiate and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination.

Replete with stories, this is a book that looks at the challenges that our education and learning environments face in a fresh way.

What the Critics Say

“A provocative and extremely important new paradigm of a ‘culture of learning’, appropriate for a world characterized by continual change. This is a must read for anyone interested in the future of education.” (James J. Duderstadt, President Emeritus, University of Michigan)

“Thomas and Brown are the John Dewey of the digital age.” (Cathy Davidson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University)

“A New Culture of Learning may provide for the digital media and learning movement what Thomas Paine’s Common Sense did for the colonists during the American Revolution— a straightforward, direct explanation of what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against.” (Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor, USC)

I'm usually a big fan of JSB. I read his PARC stuff at the Uni, and always found him incisive and original. How disappointing then this book -- which is a dull, staid, academic rehash of material found elsewhere. Authors bring nothing new to the party, except 10,000 feet generalities and observations. Yawn. If you want to explore the revolutionary potential of social media, I'd reccomend Clay Shirky -- even Seth Godin -- over this turgid, unoriginal tome. There's nothing new here that hasn't been said better elsewhere.